After the election, the case went back to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, as the U.S. Department of Justice, civil rights groups, and a number of voters sought to invalidate S.B. 14 once and for all. In August 2015, the federal appeals court panel’s deliberations focused on whether the legislature had actually intended to create a statute so blatantly discriminatory. The question of intent was central in determining whether Texas would have to undergo Section 5 preclearance scrutiny again. In a decision that fully satisfied neither of the parties, the panel of federal judges ruled that the Texas legislature had not set out, in fact, to write a law that discriminated so clearly against Hispanics and African Americans. However, the jurists continued, S.B. 14, the state’s voter ID law, did violate what was left of the Voting Rights Act.58
Confronted with being chastised for massive disfranchisement, Greg Abbott, the newly elected governor and former attorney general, continued the fiction that this law was about the sanctity of the ballot box. “Texas will continue to fight for its voter ID requirement to ensure the integrity of elections in the Lone Star State,” he declared. Attorney General Ken Paxton, for his part, defiantly stated that the ruling would not undermine the “fundamental question of Texas’ right to protect the integrity of our elections,” adding that “our state’s common-sense voter ID law remains in effect.” Despite all this bluster about the “integrity of elections,” however, there wasn’t any. It was clear that between Judge Ramos’s decision and the Fifth Circuit’s ruling, as one civil rights advocate noted, “we’ve now gone through a federal election with this discriminatory voting law in place.”59
In addition to blocking access to the polls, the GOP’s strategy is to make the very function of government so distasteful and haphazard that only the most diehard idealists or craven partisans would even bother to vote. Congressional Tea Party members have bottled up legislation, confirmation hearings, and deliberations on pressing issues such as the economy—all to demonstrate how government does not and cannot function.60 Casting Obama as uncompromising and irrational, a Republican Congress shut down the federal government at a cost to the nation of $24 billion.61 They then blamed the president.62 Obama, one pundit declared, “is betting that the Republicans will have to fold under the pressure that he creates. He is betting that they have picked the wrong issue, and that he will win by holding his breath. Understand the terms of the president’s bet: Americans lose until he wins.”63 These ‘public servants’ seemed not to care what damage they did—even to their own reputations. Indeed, that was just the point: Government—least of all under a black president—just does not function. As public approval of Congress plummeted to the single digits—indeed, one survey found that “Congress is less popular than hemorrhoids, jury duty and toenail fungus”—the result was that in the 2014 midterm elections, the United States had the lowest voter turnout since 1942.64 So many of those who had been mobilized and energized in 2008 were now disillusioned, demoralized, and, in many cases, disfranchised, and most simply stayed home.
The vitriol heaped on Obama was simply unprecedented—not least given the sheer scale of challenges he found himself confronting, and the measurable success he achieved in doing so. Obama came to office with the nation perched on the edge of a financial abyss as foreclosures and the subprime mortgage crisis consumed twenty-two trillion dollars in net wealth; the nation engaged in two endless, futile wars that had already caused thousands of American deaths (let alone the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani ones), and even more injuries, and were running up a four- to six-trillion-dollar price tag; and the nation having 16 percent of its population lacking health insurance.65 Obama’s centrist solutions and utter lack of radicalism in the face of a recalcitrant and obstructionist Congress should have made him a hero to traditional Republicans. But just the opposite happened; by the end of his first term, the president had an 85.7 percent disapproval rating among the GOP.66 One progressive wrote, “You hate Obama with a passion, despite the fact that he is a tax cutting, deficit reducing war President who undermines civil rights and delivers corporate friendly watered down reforms that benefit special interests just like a Republican. You call him a Kenyan. You call him a socialist. You dance with your hatred, singing it proudly in the rain like it was a 1950’s musical.”67
That hatred started early. When Obama was just a candidate, the racially motivated threats to his life led to Secret Service protection well before he was even a front-runner for the nomination.68 After he became the Democratic nominee, “there was a sharp and very disturbing increase in threats to Obama in September and early October, at the same time that the crowds at [GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah] Palin rallies became more frenzied.” The heated, virulent rhetoric led Michelle Obama to ask, “Why would they try to make people hate us?”69
In Obama’s first year in office alone, there was a 400 percent increase in death threats, as compared to those received by one of the least popular presidents in American history, George W. Bush.70 Facebook eventually shut down a page where hundreds answered yes to the question “Should Obama be killed?”71 The president’s Twitter account was inundated with death threats such as “Kill yourself you tree swinging nigger” and “POTUS you can count on me waiting for you in the parking lot.”72
Nor was it just the “crazies.” Respectable elements in American society actively tilled the hate-filled ground, lending an aura of authority to this campaign of terror. During the 2008 campaign, John McCain’s strategists deliberately demonized not just Obama’s policies but also the man himself, who mystically morphed into this Muslim, black nationalist, socialist, foreign, Arab, Kenyan, un-American immigrant monstrosity straight out of The Manchurian Candidate.73 So vilified was Obama that the very office of the president ensured no respect. Breaking every rule of decorum and receiving millions of kudos for doing so, South Carolina congressman Joe Wilson shouted at Obama, “You lie!” during a 2009 joint session of Congress.74 In another unceremonious and unprecedented slap in the face, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) invited Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has had a contentious relationship with the president, to address Congress but didn’t inform the White House until hours before the speech. Boehner admitted “keeping President Obama in the dark”: “I frankly didn’t want them [the Obama administration/White House] getting in the way and quashing what I thought was a real opportunity,” he explained.75
Somehow many have convinced themselves that the man who pulled the United States back into some semblance of financial health, reduced unemployment to its lowest level in decades, secured health insurance for millions of citizens, ended one of our recent, all-too-intractable wars in the Middle East, reduced the staggering deficit he inherited from George W. Bush, and masterminded the takedown of Osama bin Laden actually hates America.76 One woman noted that there was a billboard on the interstate near her town that read, “The U.S. Seals took out one threat to America, let’s vote out the other in November.”77 Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani told an audience, “I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America … He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through the love of this country.”78 Similarly, John Sununu, the former New Hampshire governor and an ally of Obama’s 2012 presidential opponent, Mitt Romney, declared that he wished that “this president would learn to be an American.”79
The hatred of Obama even seeped into those sworn to serve and protect. One white Florida police chief joked, “At first, I felt a swell of pride and patriotism while Barack Obama took his oath of office. However, all that pride quickly vanished as I later watched 21 Marines, in full dress uniform with rifles, fire a 21-gun salute to the President. It was then that I realized how far America’s military had deteriorated. Every damn one of them missed the bastard.”80 One New Hampshire police commissioner was observed sitting in the local diner glaring at the TV as he kept calling Obama a “fucking nigger.”81
A dispatcher in Ohio proudly sent e-mails that Air Force One’s new call letters were NI66ER.82 And in response to a friend’s text that “all niggers must fucking hang,” a San Francisco police officer replied, “Ask my 6 year old what he thinks about Obama.”83 Then there’s Ferguson, Missouri, where the second in command of the police force exchanged a series of e-mails with his lieutenant and a court official in which one “depicted Barack Obama as a chimpanzee, another doubted his ability as a black man to hold a job for four years, while a third labeled a photograph of a black tribal gathering ‘Michelle Obama’s high school reunion.’ ”84
Jelani Cobb wrote poignantly about the “paradox of progress.”85 Sadly, the ascent of a black man to the presidency of the United States did not, despite all the talk of hope and a post-racial society, signal progress. Instead, it has led to a situation, not so unlike the era of Jim Crow, where a sense of physical vulnerability is shared across classes in the black community.86
A woman driving to her new job at a Texas college is pulled over for not using a turn signal, jailed, and then found dead in her cell.87 A former college football player is injured in a car accident, seeks help, and is shot dead by the police.88 A high school boy goes out of his house to purchase Skittles and iced tea, only to be stalked through the neighborhood by a man with a criminal record who is carrying a loaded weapon. The unarmed child ends up dead, while the grown man is acquitted.89 A twelve-year-old is playing in the park with a toy gun; police kill him within two seconds of their arrival.90 A man merely makes eye contact with a police officer, and by the time he arrives at the jail, is nearly dead, neck broken.91 A twenty-two-year-old woman is out with some friends when an off-duty police officer, thinking he sees something suspicious, fires into the crowd. The bullet slams into her skull and she dies. He is later acquitted.92
Even where the wound is not fatal, it is grievous. An endowed professor at Harvard is arrested for being in his own house.93 New York attorney and author Lawrence Otis Graham thought that teaching his children all the rules of respectability—dress, clothes, hair, behavior in public places—and showering them with all the education, vacations, and stable home life that money could afford would provide protection. He was wrong. His son’s routine walk to class at a boarding school in New England became something much more as a carload of whites drove by and sliced through the child with the epithet “nigger” as if it were a machete.94
Black respectability or “appropriate” behavior doesn’t seem to matter. If anything, black achievement, black aspirations, and black success are construed as direct threats. Obama’s presidency made that clear. Aspirations and the achievement of these aspirations provide no protection. Not even to the God-fearing.
On June 17, 2015, South Carolinian Dylann Roof, a white, unemployed twenty-one-year-old high school dropout, was on a mission to “take his country back.” Ever since George Zimmerman had walked out of the courthouse a free man after killing Trayvon Martin, and a racially polarized nation debated the verdict, Roof had looked to understand the history of America. Trolling through the Internet, he stumbled across the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), the progeny of the 1950s White Citizens’ Council that had terrorized black people, closed schools, and worked hand in hand with state governments to defy federal civil rights laws. Its intentions on the web were cleverly masked, skewing the facts, rewriting history, and draped in the flag to lend an aura of authority and respectability.95
The White Citizens’ Council had tapered off during the late 1950s, but it had a rebirth in the 1980s and, in its new incarnation, became one of the go-to destinations for ambitious Republicans. The CCC’s core values center on a Christianity that justifies slavery, embraces racially homogenous societies, and emphasizes blacks as a “retrograde species of humanity.” But despite the group’s avowed racist belief system, in the mid to late 1990s, as the Southern Poverty Law Center reports, “the group boasted of having 34 members who were in the Mississippi legislature and had powerful Republican Party allies, including then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi.” By 2004, Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, the chair of the Republican National Committee, and thirty-seven other powerful politicians had all attended CCC events in the twenty-first century. In 2013, it was discovered that Roan Garcia-Quintana, a Tea Party stalwart on South Carolina governor Nikki Haley’s reelection steering committee, was a CCC board member. Moreover, the Council of Conservative Citizens’ webmaster, Kyle Rogers, was a member of the GOP executive committee in Dorchester County, South Carolina, as recently as 2013. In addition, the Council of Conservative Citizens’ chair, Earl Holt III, gave “$65,000 to Republican campaign funds in recent years,” including donations to the 2016 presidential campaigns of Rand Paul (R-KY), Rick Santorum (R-PA), and Ted Cruz (R-TX).96
The CCC, then, enjoyed precisely the cachet of respectability that racism requires to achieve its own goals within American society. And its website of hatred and lies provided the self-serving education Dylann Roof so desperately craved. He drank in the poison of its message, got into his car, drove to Charleston, entered Emanuel AME Church, and landed in a Bible study with a group of African Americans who were the very model of respectability. Roof prayed with them. Read the Bible with them. Thought they were “so nice.” Then he shot them dead, leaving just one woman alive so that she could tell the world what he had done and why.97
“You’re taking over our country,” he said, and he knew this to be true.98
Epilogue
Imagine
Not even a full month after Dylann Roof gunned down nine African Americans at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump fired up his “silent majority” audience of thousands in July 2015 with a macabre promise: “Don’t worry, we’ll take our country back.”1
It’s time instead that we take our country forward into the future, a better future.
More than a century and a half of anger and fear have undermined American democracy, trampled on the Constitution, and treated some citizens as chattel and others as collateral damage.
This didn’t have to be. The Land of Opportunity did not have to be the Land of Missed Opportunities. We, as a nation, have a choice. We’ve always had those choices, but instead of seizing the moment and moving forward, we have been diverted by the rage and the fear that have kept us spiraling in recurring themes of racism, discrimination, disfranchisement, illiteracy, and a thoroughly inequitable criminal justice system.
It is time to defuse the power of white rage. It is time to move into that future. It is a future where the right to vote is unfettered by discriminatory restrictions that prevent millions of American citizens from having any say in their own government. A poll tax in 1942 that led to only 3 percent of the voting-age population in seven Southern states choosing elected officials was never a democracy. And neither, in this decade, is a voter turnout of 1.48 percent in Texas’s statewide election. Moreover, the millions of dollars that Republican governors and legislators have spent on new voter suppression laws—purportedly to stop a voter fraud problem that never existed—while gutting health care, mental health, and education funding in already strained state budgets, suggests that the cost of subverting democracy extends far beyond the ballot box.2
The future is one that invests in our children by making access to good schools the norm, not the exception, and certainly not dependent on zip code. We know the consequences of dysfunctional school systems. We see the wasted lives, just as clearly as Eisenhower and Congressman Carl Elliott saw them during the Sputnik crisis. At that time, the political leaders chose to look away, to avert their eyes, as if leaving millions of children in segregated, decrepit schools did not undermine the hopes of America’s smallest citizens while also undercutting the strength of the nation as a whole. We can choose not to listen to the rage and, instead, craft a stronger, more viable future for this nation. We can ask tough questions such as: Why use property taxes as the basis for funding
schools when that method rewards discriminatory public policy and perpetuates the inequalities that undermine our society?
The future is one that takes seriously a justice system whose enormous powers are actually used to serve and protect. The misuse is storied—from the convict-lease labor system, to one that allowed known murderers to walk around scot-free, to one that is now employed to undercut the gains of the Civil Rights Movement.3 A program that stops and frisks predominantly those who are the least likely to have illegal contraband is not law enforcement.4 A war on drugs that uses race and ethnicity as the litmus test for crime is not justice.5 Millions of black citizens recognize this and, therefore, question the very legitimacy of this key pillar in American democracy.6 Meanwhile, state budgets have cracked under the strain of bloated, unsustainable prison systems.7 Mayors worry that their cities will ignite when yet another black person, who is more likely than not unarmed, is killed by police.8 The costs of the continued misuse of the criminal justice system are more than the United States can bear—morally, politically, and financially.
White Rage Page 17